Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Maduro explained yesterday
that the collapse of oil prices in the last months is not caused by market
forces but it is instead part of an economic war waged by the Empire against
Russia and Venezuela.

“We are in an economic
war,” insisted Maduro, “nobody should fool himself about it. The bourgeoisie, together
with its imperial allies, have decided to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution
through and economic war.”

The Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) reports
that: “President Nicolás Maduro warned of the economic war lead by the
North-American Empire against the oil market that seeks to end Russia, which
has become a power of peace, and [this economic war] ‘also wants to destroy
Venezuela.’”

“There is an oil war
and it has one objective,” further explained Maduro,” to collapse Russia, destroy
Russia, and it also will try to destroy Venezuela.”

“This is a planned
war that wants to re-colonialize Venezuela, trough actions for the destruction
of our independence and our revolution by fomenting the economic collapse. The
Venezuelan oligarchic right is also conspiring with those plans,” said Maduro.

He also included as
part of the plot the “undermining of the institutionally of the country, by
blocking the designation of new authorities of Public Powers [in Congress].”

As evidence of his
claims of an “oil war” conspiracy, Maduro reminded that “the attack against oil
producing countries has been a recurrent strategy by the United States, as has
been demonstrated during the economic sabotage of Venezuela in 2002, the
military invasion of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011.”

Sunday, December 28, 2014

The final days of the
year 2014 have seen the
polemical selection of authorities to the Citizen’s Power, the Electoral
Power, and 15 judges to Venezuela’s highest court (TSJ). The Constitution
stablishes those selections to be made by a qualified two thirds majority vote
in Congress, however the government has managed to reinterpret the Constitution
and the authorities have been selected by the simple majority vote of the pro-government
parties (The electoral authorities were
named by the TSJ after the congress failed to reach an agreement in three
attempts).

The most radical opponents
have taken to twitter to denounce a “secret agreement” between the opposition
coalition Mesa de la Unidad (MUD) and
the government for the selection of the authorities (See retweets by @PacoDeMiranda).

What the MUD stand to
win from the supposed agreement is not made clear, but the most radical wing to
the opposition has often argued that the MUD is in cahoots with the government,
calling the MUD the “official opposition” and “collaborationists”.

A recurrent theme of
these radical opponents is their frustration with what they consider to be Capriles
and the MUD’s lack of courage to defend a supposed victory over Maduro in the
April 2013 presidential election, which they claim was fraudulently stolen by
the Electoral Council, possibly conspiring with the MUD. Evidence of this
conspiracy would be the “willingness” of the MUD leaders to sit with Maduro in
the failed negotiation round tables last year.

They therefore
distrust both government and MUD and actively call on the opposition followers
to abstain from future elections and to “take to the streets” [calle y más calle] until the government
falls.

For example listen to
this audio
presentation by Dr. Ludwig Moreno on the ongoing “electoral fraud”.

AVN insists in its
report that all the deaths and injured are attributable to the “terrorist
actions organized by right-wing political parties as part of a plan for a coup d’état.”
No mention is made in the AVN note about the government’s repression during the
protests, or about the documented
responsibility of police and pro-government groups in at least some of the
casualties.

Instead, Maduro
stressed that “during this year our Fatherland was capable [of resisting] those
who wanted to destroy it and, even if we are suffering from some wounds, our
Fatherland continues to move forward.”

In his Christmas
message Maduro again congratulated himself that the year 2014 had ended
peacefully “in spite of the guarimbas, the terrorist actions organized by rightist
sectors as part of the plans for a coup d’état that left 43 dead and 800
injured.”

Friday, December 19, 2014

A notable absence in Diosdado
Cabello’s recent Op-Ed for the New York Times is conspiracy theories. In
the article the opposition is indirectly blamed for the deaths caused by the
protests that began in February, and Cabello sais that the Venezuelan government
“responded with restrain, allowing those violent demonstrators to go on for
several months.”

However no mention is
made by Cabello of his claims repeated weekly in his TV show “Con el Mazo Dando”:
the protests were caused by paid mercenaries, organized by NGOs financed by The
Empire, opposition leaders, and CIA agents. There is no mention of magnicidio plans by opposition leaders
to kill him or president Maduro, and no mention of an Economic War waged by the
Empire. It seems conspiracy theories are only for internal Venezuelan
consumption.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Nicolás
Maduro announced that economist Ricardo Hausmann and political analyst
Moisés Naim are lobbying credit rating agencies against Venezuela and thus
preventing the country from having access to new credits.

“The aim of these
traitors to the Fatherland, these technocrats that were expelled from the
country by the revolutionary landslide led by Chávez, is to make [the rating
agencies] qualify Venezuela as a high risk country, they go around the world
trying to discredit the nation,” claimed Maduro.

He
also announced the establishment of a new “Economic War High Command” under
the direct control of the president.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

“During the UNASUR
meeting we received the information, [including] name and bank account, and how
much they paid him, of a sicario who
was sent from Central America in an operation against me in Ecuador,” declared
Maduro today.

According to El
Universal, Maduro said that he had immediately informed Ecuador´s president
Rafael Correa of the threat, so that security could be “reinforced.”

According to Maduro,
the sicario sent to assassinate him
had arrived in Ecuador the day before, but added that “we are looking for him
in Venezuela, and Ecuador´s authorities already have the information.”

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

President Maduro
yesterday made
a detailed chronology of what he called the “six battles imposed by the
oligarchy and heroically faced by the Venezuelan people I the last two years.”

Maduro’s narration is a complete revision of the events country’s recent history read as the result of
a permanent plot by its enemies. No evidence has ever been provided by the
Venezuelan government for any of
these plots, but they are now part of the official discourse and accepted as
facts by State media.

The first of the
battles mentioned by Maduro was fought in the period between Chávez’s last
public appearance on 8 December 2012, and his death on 5 March 2013. This first offensive by the oligarchy was
based, according to Maduro, on a “campaign of hatred and immorality” aimed at
sowing divisions in the “revolutionary forces.”

The second test to
the Venezuelan people includes the period between 5 March, and 14 April, when
Maduro narrowly defeated opposition candidate Capriles Radonsky in the
presidential elections.

The third battle came
after the opposition refused to acknowledge defeat on that election: “The third
test began in April 14 and went on until the middle of May, [the opposition] failed
to recognize the results, [they started] a violent insurrection in the country,
and we defeated them, it was an insurrectional attempt with guarimbas [street barricades], which
unfortunately provoked 11 deaths and more than 80 people injured.” Then,
continues Maduro, “came the war against the electric system, the economic war,
and even a magnicidio [assassination
of the head of state] attempt through hired para-militaries who were arrested
by the intelligence agencies of the country.”

The fourth battle was
the election of city majors and municipal councils held in December 8, 2013.

The fifth battle started
with the opposition protests of February 2014 and continued until June. It was
one of the most violent and harmful test to the country, said Maduro: “[it was]
a violent insurrection, included in a continuous coup d’état plot, and a deepening
of the economic war.” Maduro again blamed the opposition for the 44 deaths resulting
from the protests. The Agencia Venezolana
de Noticias adds in its report that the protests were part of a “terrorist
plan” by the opposition. “We were all for dialogue, for work, for the union of
Venezuela, but they had another card up their sleeve: ‘Made in USA’, because
all this plot was brewed in the United States, against our fatherland, and they
[the USA] put a lot of money into it,” further explained Maduro. The plot also
had “spinoffs” in the assassinations of chavista
leaders Eliécer Otaiza and Robert Serra.

The sixth and final battle
is the current increased offensive of the “economic war,” which is based on an “induced”
inflation manufactured by the national and international bourgeoisie. Also part
of this plot is an attack by the opposition on the foods and services
distribution systems. Fortunately, says AVN, “the state has reactivated many of
these structures in its thriving struggle against the powerful business sectors
that dominate the market, in order to supply the population (…), without regard
to social class of political affiliation.”

Yesterday president
Maduro again
insisted that Venezuela is suffering a “financial blockade” by world
markets.

“We have a financial blockade
against Venezuela to block our access to the funds we need to overcome the decrease
of oil revenues,” the president told supporters at the closing of the First
Congress of Social Movements of the Great Patriotic Pole.

According to the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias, Maduro
explained that “the mechanism of the blockade consists in the increase of the
risk assessments of Venezuela by world market qualifying agencies, with the aim
of obstructing the country’s access to foreign currency.”

Maduro complained
that Venezuela is being asked to pay higher interest rates than countries “that
are at war or suffering from the scourge of Ebola. (…) They want us to pay 35%
when other countries pay 6%.”

The president also
denied the existence of a black market dollar, instead he claimed that it is
part of an “economic war” waged against Venezuela by “the right”: “the parallel
dollar doesn’t exist in Venezuela’s economic reality, they want to impose it on
us an instrument of the financial, monetary, psychological, and political war,”
declared Maduro.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

In an interview
in Telesur yesterday, president Maduro warned of “an international plan to
finish off Venezuela.”

According to Maduro,
the economic crisis the country is facing is not due to the government’s
policies, but to “an imperialist plan to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution.”

These “difficulties [faced]
by Venezuela come not from natural causes, they are [designed] to generate
social irritation (…) the collapse of an independent Venezuela in the twenty
first century. (…) They respond to imperialist sectors that think they can do
to us what they did to Allende,” explained Maduro.

The imperialist plot against
Venezuela would include, according to the president, an “international financial
blockade” of the country.

Maduro sees evidence
of this plan in the fact that “international risk evaluation agencies are
putting Venezuela as one of the riskiest countries in the world.” This, said
Maduro, “does not respond to economic financial logic, instead it responds
to a strategy.” As a result of the strategy
“Venezuela today is facing impossible conditions to access credit lines.”

Maduro also informed
that his government is in the process of revising relations with the United
States because, he
explained, interventionism by the US embassy in Caracas is “becoming
intolerable.”

“I am evaluating our
relations with the United States. (…) At the right time, I will justly explain to
our Fatherland the actions I am being forced to take to defend the dignity, the
peace, and the Constitution. (…) I have plenty of information of the
interventionism by the United States embassy. (…) They [the US] are trapped by
their failed policy of trying to destabilize Venezuela and of keeping operators
in the political and financial areas, moving around and doing things against the
Venezuelan Government, this is all regrettable,” lamented Maduro.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

President Maduro explained
yesterday that the economic war he claims is being waged against Venezuela
by the opposition will continue in 2015. But he also claimed that next year his
government will launch a “demolishing offensive” that will “defeat the economic
war promoted by the Venezuelan right.”

“We have so far
managed to neutralize some elements of the economic war, but in 2015 we have to
put all our bets [jugar completicas]
in getting rid of these apátridas
(without fatherland, the opposition) and in making our country an articulated
and productive country and a new economy,” declared Maduro.

To achieve this victory
in the Economic War, Maduro proposed that the new productive economy should be
based in the proliferations and industrialization of the conuco (traditional subsistence farms): “One, conuco, two conucos,
three… until we reach the agro-industrial and exporting [levels].”

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Opposition leader
Maria Corina Machado has
formally heard charges of “conspiracy to destroy the republican way of
politics” from the Prosecutor’s office today. Her lawyer, Tomás Arias says that
the charges do not mention magnicidio
(attempt to kill the head of state), but that Machado could face a prison sentence
of 8 to 16 years for conspiracy.